FUTURE IMPERFECT
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters except for the ones that I created.
CHAPTER 2-CONVERGENCE
Saturday Morning. One of the two days out of the entire week, with the other being Sunday, that her little family got all to themselves, with no one asking for help on an assignment or the Dean asking her if she and her husband would mind having dinner with a visiting scholar. All during the week their nights were spent either at class, studying, or doing something with Hope. Every great once in a while they would help out someone in need that had a problem that was supernatural in nature. But they had made sure to keep their role only to doing the research, for both had agreed that they wanted to keep everything that was even remotely supernatural away from their daughter. This Saturday morning dawned cool and foggy. By the time she woke up it was well past nine, something that momentarily threw her into a state of panic that she never knew herself capable of. Without thinking, or stopping to put any clothes on, she threw back the covers and tore through their small house until she heard something that at the same time sent a wave of relief through her and a little bit of confusion. From the next room she could hear the beginning of the television program that Wesley and Hope tried to always watch together. While it was true that she was far too young to actually grasp anything about it the show did seem to be able to capture Hope's attention and it did set a time every week that father and daughter, if not the entire family, could be together and have some quiet time. Hope spent that time gazing gleefully at the screen while Wesley would usually be grading papers or essays and Faith would either be helping him or trying to feed Hope, but never a combination of the two. She had tried that once, but had quickly discovered that the two didn't mix when Wesley would have to explain to his students why their papers had baby food stains on them.
She stood silent for a few seconds, naked as the day she was born, in their kitchen trying to decide what to do, whether to storm into the warm and light filled living room and demand a reason that she had been allowed to sleep in or to go back to bed. In the end she chose the latter, but soon found that she couldn't sleep and so she got up again and slipped into her comfortable clothes. Clothes that a half dozen or so years earlier she wouldn't have been caught dead in, and old well worn pare of panties covered up by a warm pair of Wesley's sweatpants, some of his extra thick wooly socks, an old bra, and one of Wesley's old sweatshirts topped off with putting her hair up in one loose ponytail and putting on no makeup. In truth she felt the most comfortable on Saturday mornings dressed like this, because it meant that no matter the mistakes, the horrors, that she had committed in her past she had atoned for them and they were all in her past, and this was her future, full of hope and promise.
As she began to walk back through the halls to the kitchen and then the living room she self appraised the building that had for the first time in her life truly become her home. When they had moved in the entire house looked like an old couple had been living there for years. And although Bob Vila he wasn't Wesley took it upon himself to transform the building into their new home, with Faith at times pitching in where she could, in between classes and conferences at the college. At first their home had taken on more the look of almost a library, with little style or flair but with a great deal of comfortable looking furniture all over. It hadn't taken long for Faith to rebel against that and in the end they had agreed to do each room together until they were both satisfied with the outcome. And so they had moved much faster after that and ended up with a place that they both were glad to call home. Wesley had his study in one of the larger rooms on the second floor with the other rooms being used up mainly just as storage with one room left made up as a guest bedroom and another left almost empty, waiting for, whether either would ever admit it or not, would be Hope's room when she was old enough if not one of the rooms downstairs or a room for a new addition to the family. Wesley had been able to retrieve almost all of his books from the Hyperion without Angel or any of the others even knowing, leaving them only a note saying that he needed the books and was sorry for taking them along with wishing them the best in their future endeavors. At first Faith had hated the study, for it reminded her to much of the stuffy and rigid lifestyle that she and later Wesley had rebelled from. But still Wesley found comfort in the smell of the books, the thought of having all of that knowledge close at hand, and even though he hadn't admitted it the books were a connection to his past in Los Angeles, the last place that he had ever thought of as home, after England. Faith had never been one for reading had over time ended up spending almost as much time in Wesley's study as he had, her nose into one book or another even some of Wesley's ancient tomes as she had begun to try and teach herself to read some of the ancient languages that Wesley could, at times spending hours looking up information on the internet while Wesley searched through his books, with Hope in her swing in between them. Faith wanted more than anything to get away from the stereotypical view of her that she thought everyone who used to know her had, of a young woman that shot first and asked questions later, having little if any care for studying and researching, thinking of them as a waste of time.
The kitchen on the ground floor had been at first very small but even though neither was truly even close to being a good cook they had decided that they'd both need to learn, a feat that took a good long while and an oven and several burnt meals later they could now actually cook, if only well enough for themselves and Hope. Off of the back of the kitchen, and through a wall of many windows highlighted by two large mostly glass doors that led out to the deck. The deck had everything on it from a pool to a place to entertain, something that they didn't do very often, and a large grill that was more for show than for anything else. Hope slept with them in their room, the third largest room on the ground floor after the kitchen and the living room, in a little basinet that sat right beside Faith's side of the bed. Their bedroom at first could almost have been cut in two, with all of his things in one closet and all of hers in the other. But over time they had found a way to merge their things, with whatever was left over like almost everything that reminded either of them of Wesley's days as a watcher or Faith's younger party hearty days being boxed up and jammed into the attic. Now they had divided the closets into two divisions, in one closet Wesley and Faith had fit all of what they coined their work and dress up clothes while in the other closet they placed all of their more comfortable clothes. Even though they no longer actively fought the good fight like they previously had Wesley still kept his guns, locked of course, in the nightstand near his side of the bed. Luckily he had yet to ever use them and had only taken them out of the nightstand so that Faith could get comfortable enough with them to be able to defend herself and Hope in situations in which all of her slayer powers were of little or no use.
The living room had at first been a small room with only a few small windows, but Wesley and Faith had knocked down a wall or two and replaced the few small windows with a large bank of windows, making it so that in the morning the rising sun would fill the room with light and warmth. They had electronically decked out their living room well enough that they were the envy of the few friends that they had, but whereas most would expect them to have a cabinet full of various types of movies that fit their taste they mostly had children's movies for Hope at the moment and when she would get older. They had relegated the upper shelves of the cabinet to their movies, which ran the genre gambit, housing everything from documentaries about topics pertaining to his studies into ancient cultures to Faith's action movies and drama's. There were a few comedies and romantic movies but they had all been put in the back or far to one side.
The basement now mostly consisted of a mud room, storage for winter clothes, and a space for the washer and dryer. Wesley and Faith took turns doing the laundry and each used the time while they were waiting to catch up on any small bit of reading that they had missed or it gave Faith just enough time to try and get Hope to go to sleep. Luckily Wesley and Faith had been able to carpet enough of the basement so that it looked relatively close to being normal. There was a small garage attached to the house that held two vehicles, Wesley's SUV and Faith had at first gotten a sporty car for herself but then when she found out that she was pregnant with Hope she had traded it in for a more responsible and safer car. At first after that Faith had sworn that one day she'd get the sports car back, but as time went on she had made that promise less and less. Attached to the back of the house garage was a much smaller one that housed all of their lawn care supplies, from a trio of mowers to weed whips and various bags of fertilizer and insect repellant.
The only other building on the property was a large barn that was partially hidden in the tree line that helped to frame their property. Like the house very little of the barn could be seen from the road through the trees and even then most people never though twice about what transpired beyond the front wall of trees. In fact Wesley had turned the barn into something that Faith had also never truly had, a fully equipped place to train. While it was true that she hardly ever went patrolling anymore she did do it on occasion and so she had to be up to the task. So from the outside the barn looked like your normal run of the mill old barn. But from the inside it looked more like a gym, complete with a small set of weights that helped to keep her in shape as well as plenty of room to spar. Faith had used this space to quickly get back into shape after Hope had been born, along with the three mile run that she tried to do every morning, even going so far as to have Wesley accompany her every so often. Out in the barn it was actually quite warm most nights and so Hope had spent more than a few nights sleeping beside her parents after they had exhausted themselves in a training session.
When Faith had discovered that a friend of hers, Callie Freeman, had been abused by her boyfriend she had taken Callie in and began to teach her how to defend herself. Wesley had initially wanted to call the police but Faith had talked him out of it as she had other ideas of how to resolve the situation. In the end Callie had learned well enough and had ended up breaking her boyfriend's nose and his arm in two places. After that the boyfriend had left Callie alone, as did many other people. Since then Callie had become close enough to Faith and Wesley to serve as babysitter for Hope, allowing at first Wesley and Faith to simply catch up on missed sleep. But then over time they had been able to actually go out to dinner again.
Wesley hadn't made many actual friends, sure there were his colleagues at the college but he knew them better as acquaintances than friends. His ability, as well as Faith's, to make friends had been hampered by their desire to keep as many aspects of their lives before their move to upstate New York a secret as they could. In fact Callie only knew very few details about Faith and Wesley other than a few things past their names, Alexander and Elizabeth Windholm along with their daughter Hope. She knew that Alex(Wesley) had been born and raised outside of London before moving to America to find his own lot in life and had met Beth(Faith) in a nightclub in Los Angeles. They had fallen in love shortly after and had waited until they had both been through college to get married. Of course most of what Callie knew was lies, but there had been a little bit of truth spread throughout that so that Faith and Wesley didn't feel to terribly bad about lying so much. The only friend that Wesley could think of that he had the same relationship with that Faith had with Callie was Nicholas Burton. Nick worked as one of the school's librarian, charged with the task of protecting the school's oldest and rarest books, many of which ended up being books that so far Wesley had no idea why the school even had them. The books were very similar to the books that Wesley had used when he had worked with Angel back in Los Angeles. For his own part Nick had done more than simply catalog and protect the books, going so far as to actually try to decipher some of them, as long as the assistant Dean or the head of the library didn't know about it, as both of them had repeatedly warned him against doing anything with the books other than assure their preservation. But that had done little to put a damper on his curiosity, and many a night Wesley had spent many hours down in the library's vault pouring over the few tomes that Nick could sneak out of the vault.
Six months after Callie had taken care of her problem with her abusive boyfriend Faith had played matchmaker and had set Nick up with Callie. At first it seemed to be a disaster, but after a rough night in which Callie and Nick had ran through the rain and hid out in the library to avoid what they thought were a group of dangerously overzealous Halloween enthusiasts who in turn were actually true vampires, did the outlook change. At first Wesley hadn't noticed anything different that next day, but then he noticed that both Nick and Callie were still wearing what they had worn the night before and after more than a few knowing looks from Faith had figured out what had happened during the night. A few weeks after that Nick had begun to help Callie when she babysat Hope.
* * * * * * * *
Angel and Gwen had left the very night that Lorne had told them about what was in his latest reading. They had initially thought about driving the whole way but Gwen had protested mightily and Angel wasn't to excited about the prospect of having to black out the cars windows and dodge from one small patch of shade to another, and so they had chartered a small private plane, with some of the money that Gunn and Fred had borrowed during their little burglary spree, and were soon well on their way to New York City with them expecting to arrive either sometime late Friday night or early Saturday morning, which in turn ended up being the same Saturday morning that Faith had been allowed to oversleep. As if the news of an impending Apocalypse hadn't been enough Angel was also desperately trying to come to grips with the little surprise that Buffy and Spike had sprung on him during their visit only a few days before, that the pair were expecting their first child and that a wedding between them would most likely happen the first chance that they got. At first Angel had been beyond furious at the news, wanting to storm over and rip Spike's throat out, but he had been stopped dead in his tracks by the look of complete and utter joy, peace, and happiness on Buffy's face. He hadn't seen a look like that on her face in a very long time. It took him most of the flight to finally begin to come to terms with the news, feeling that in the end what really mattered to him that Buffy was happy, whether it be with him or Spike. And as long as Spike kept Buffy happy then Angel would refrain from doing any serious bodily harm to the former vampire. Cordelia had been overjoyed at the news as she hoped that with Buffy having Spike's baby that Angel would finally be free of Buffy and she'd finally have that second chance with Angel that she had been dreaming of. But Gwen had been a giant roadblock in that case and over the years she and Cordelia had tried to get in and stay in Angel's good graces while trying to shove the other out.
Gwen had kept most of her money, saying that since she had stopped being a thief for hire and begun fighting the good fight that she'd need the money, or as she oh so deftly put it, "A girl's gotta eat." Although even Connor knew that Gwen's statement had nothing to do with food. Angel and the others had tried there best to not have to ask Gwen for any handouts or loans. Luckily for them the vampire and demon activity in Los Angeles had stayed pretty constant and they had all established a comfortable enough lifestyle for themselves while making sure that Connor was enrolled in school and that Liam's education was completely paid for even when preschool was still a few years off.
* * * * * * * * *
Initially Spike and Buffy had sworn to Dawn that they'd let her relocate to drama school in New York without their help. But shortly after Dawn had left Buffy and Spike had packed their things and after a quick visit to Los Angeles to see Angel and the others they had sped off towards New York, intending to be there if and when Dawn became homesick or got into trouble. For even though Dawn was the new slayer Spike and Buffy still felt overprotective of her. Their secret reason for going was also to help and make sure that Dawn was able to get people around her that she could trust, maybe even enough to tell them about who she really was and about everything that entailed.
They had only gotten to Texas before Buffy began having disturbing nightmares, but she was having trouble discerning whether or not the nightmares were like her other prophetic slayer dreams, whether they were just your normal run of the mill nightmares, or whether the nightmares were somehow connected to her unborn child. Meanwhile in New York Dawn had already settled into her dorm room and after some time had finally let one of her roommates that was from the area show them around. So she thought nothing of it when they drove past a property with a line of trees out front that hid behind them a small house and a barn nestled back in the tree line.
END OF CHAPTER 2
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters except for the ones that I created.
CHAPTER 2-CONVERGENCE
Saturday Morning. One of the two days out of the entire week, with the other being Sunday, that her little family got all to themselves, with no one asking for help on an assignment or the Dean asking her if she and her husband would mind having dinner with a visiting scholar. All during the week their nights were spent either at class, studying, or doing something with Hope. Every great once in a while they would help out someone in need that had a problem that was supernatural in nature. But they had made sure to keep their role only to doing the research, for both had agreed that they wanted to keep everything that was even remotely supernatural away from their daughter. This Saturday morning dawned cool and foggy. By the time she woke up it was well past nine, something that momentarily threw her into a state of panic that she never knew herself capable of. Without thinking, or stopping to put any clothes on, she threw back the covers and tore through their small house until she heard something that at the same time sent a wave of relief through her and a little bit of confusion. From the next room she could hear the beginning of the television program that Wesley and Hope tried to always watch together. While it was true that she was far too young to actually grasp anything about it the show did seem to be able to capture Hope's attention and it did set a time every week that father and daughter, if not the entire family, could be together and have some quiet time. Hope spent that time gazing gleefully at the screen while Wesley would usually be grading papers or essays and Faith would either be helping him or trying to feed Hope, but never a combination of the two. She had tried that once, but had quickly discovered that the two didn't mix when Wesley would have to explain to his students why their papers had baby food stains on them.
She stood silent for a few seconds, naked as the day she was born, in their kitchen trying to decide what to do, whether to storm into the warm and light filled living room and demand a reason that she had been allowed to sleep in or to go back to bed. In the end she chose the latter, but soon found that she couldn't sleep and so she got up again and slipped into her comfortable clothes. Clothes that a half dozen or so years earlier she wouldn't have been caught dead in, and old well worn pare of panties covered up by a warm pair of Wesley's sweatpants, some of his extra thick wooly socks, an old bra, and one of Wesley's old sweatshirts topped off with putting her hair up in one loose ponytail and putting on no makeup. In truth she felt the most comfortable on Saturday mornings dressed like this, because it meant that no matter the mistakes, the horrors, that she had committed in her past she had atoned for them and they were all in her past, and this was her future, full of hope and promise.
As she began to walk back through the halls to the kitchen and then the living room she self appraised the building that had for the first time in her life truly become her home. When they had moved in the entire house looked like an old couple had been living there for years. And although Bob Vila he wasn't Wesley took it upon himself to transform the building into their new home, with Faith at times pitching in where she could, in between classes and conferences at the college. At first their home had taken on more the look of almost a library, with little style or flair but with a great deal of comfortable looking furniture all over. It hadn't taken long for Faith to rebel against that and in the end they had agreed to do each room together until they were both satisfied with the outcome. And so they had moved much faster after that and ended up with a place that they both were glad to call home. Wesley had his study in one of the larger rooms on the second floor with the other rooms being used up mainly just as storage with one room left made up as a guest bedroom and another left almost empty, waiting for, whether either would ever admit it or not, would be Hope's room when she was old enough if not one of the rooms downstairs or a room for a new addition to the family. Wesley had been able to retrieve almost all of his books from the Hyperion without Angel or any of the others even knowing, leaving them only a note saying that he needed the books and was sorry for taking them along with wishing them the best in their future endeavors. At first Faith had hated the study, for it reminded her to much of the stuffy and rigid lifestyle that she and later Wesley had rebelled from. But still Wesley found comfort in the smell of the books, the thought of having all of that knowledge close at hand, and even though he hadn't admitted it the books were a connection to his past in Los Angeles, the last place that he had ever thought of as home, after England. Faith had never been one for reading had over time ended up spending almost as much time in Wesley's study as he had, her nose into one book or another even some of Wesley's ancient tomes as she had begun to try and teach herself to read some of the ancient languages that Wesley could, at times spending hours looking up information on the internet while Wesley searched through his books, with Hope in her swing in between them. Faith wanted more than anything to get away from the stereotypical view of her that she thought everyone who used to know her had, of a young woman that shot first and asked questions later, having little if any care for studying and researching, thinking of them as a waste of time.
The kitchen on the ground floor had been at first very small but even though neither was truly even close to being a good cook they had decided that they'd both need to learn, a feat that took a good long while and an oven and several burnt meals later they could now actually cook, if only well enough for themselves and Hope. Off of the back of the kitchen, and through a wall of many windows highlighted by two large mostly glass doors that led out to the deck. The deck had everything on it from a pool to a place to entertain, something that they didn't do very often, and a large grill that was more for show than for anything else. Hope slept with them in their room, the third largest room on the ground floor after the kitchen and the living room, in a little basinet that sat right beside Faith's side of the bed. Their bedroom at first could almost have been cut in two, with all of his things in one closet and all of hers in the other. But over time they had found a way to merge their things, with whatever was left over like almost everything that reminded either of them of Wesley's days as a watcher or Faith's younger party hearty days being boxed up and jammed into the attic. Now they had divided the closets into two divisions, in one closet Wesley and Faith had fit all of what they coined their work and dress up clothes while in the other closet they placed all of their more comfortable clothes. Even though they no longer actively fought the good fight like they previously had Wesley still kept his guns, locked of course, in the nightstand near his side of the bed. Luckily he had yet to ever use them and had only taken them out of the nightstand so that Faith could get comfortable enough with them to be able to defend herself and Hope in situations in which all of her slayer powers were of little or no use.
The living room had at first been a small room with only a few small windows, but Wesley and Faith had knocked down a wall or two and replaced the few small windows with a large bank of windows, making it so that in the morning the rising sun would fill the room with light and warmth. They had electronically decked out their living room well enough that they were the envy of the few friends that they had, but whereas most would expect them to have a cabinet full of various types of movies that fit their taste they mostly had children's movies for Hope at the moment and when she would get older. They had relegated the upper shelves of the cabinet to their movies, which ran the genre gambit, housing everything from documentaries about topics pertaining to his studies into ancient cultures to Faith's action movies and drama's. There were a few comedies and romantic movies but they had all been put in the back or far to one side.
The basement now mostly consisted of a mud room, storage for winter clothes, and a space for the washer and dryer. Wesley and Faith took turns doing the laundry and each used the time while they were waiting to catch up on any small bit of reading that they had missed or it gave Faith just enough time to try and get Hope to go to sleep. Luckily Wesley and Faith had been able to carpet enough of the basement so that it looked relatively close to being normal. There was a small garage attached to the house that held two vehicles, Wesley's SUV and Faith had at first gotten a sporty car for herself but then when she found out that she was pregnant with Hope she had traded it in for a more responsible and safer car. At first after that Faith had sworn that one day she'd get the sports car back, but as time went on she had made that promise less and less. Attached to the back of the house garage was a much smaller one that housed all of their lawn care supplies, from a trio of mowers to weed whips and various bags of fertilizer and insect repellant.
The only other building on the property was a large barn that was partially hidden in the tree line that helped to frame their property. Like the house very little of the barn could be seen from the road through the trees and even then most people never though twice about what transpired beyond the front wall of trees. In fact Wesley had turned the barn into something that Faith had also never truly had, a fully equipped place to train. While it was true that she hardly ever went patrolling anymore she did do it on occasion and so she had to be up to the task. So from the outside the barn looked like your normal run of the mill old barn. But from the inside it looked more like a gym, complete with a small set of weights that helped to keep her in shape as well as plenty of room to spar. Faith had used this space to quickly get back into shape after Hope had been born, along with the three mile run that she tried to do every morning, even going so far as to have Wesley accompany her every so often. Out in the barn it was actually quite warm most nights and so Hope had spent more than a few nights sleeping beside her parents after they had exhausted themselves in a training session.
When Faith had discovered that a friend of hers, Callie Freeman, had been abused by her boyfriend she had taken Callie in and began to teach her how to defend herself. Wesley had initially wanted to call the police but Faith had talked him out of it as she had other ideas of how to resolve the situation. In the end Callie had learned well enough and had ended up breaking her boyfriend's nose and his arm in two places. After that the boyfriend had left Callie alone, as did many other people. Since then Callie had become close enough to Faith and Wesley to serve as babysitter for Hope, allowing at first Wesley and Faith to simply catch up on missed sleep. But then over time they had been able to actually go out to dinner again.
Wesley hadn't made many actual friends, sure there were his colleagues at the college but he knew them better as acquaintances than friends. His ability, as well as Faith's, to make friends had been hampered by their desire to keep as many aspects of their lives before their move to upstate New York a secret as they could. In fact Callie only knew very few details about Faith and Wesley other than a few things past their names, Alexander and Elizabeth Windholm along with their daughter Hope. She knew that Alex(Wesley) had been born and raised outside of London before moving to America to find his own lot in life and had met Beth(Faith) in a nightclub in Los Angeles. They had fallen in love shortly after and had waited until they had both been through college to get married. Of course most of what Callie knew was lies, but there had been a little bit of truth spread throughout that so that Faith and Wesley didn't feel to terribly bad about lying so much. The only friend that Wesley could think of that he had the same relationship with that Faith had with Callie was Nicholas Burton. Nick worked as one of the school's librarian, charged with the task of protecting the school's oldest and rarest books, many of which ended up being books that so far Wesley had no idea why the school even had them. The books were very similar to the books that Wesley had used when he had worked with Angel back in Los Angeles. For his own part Nick had done more than simply catalog and protect the books, going so far as to actually try to decipher some of them, as long as the assistant Dean or the head of the library didn't know about it, as both of them had repeatedly warned him against doing anything with the books other than assure their preservation. But that had done little to put a damper on his curiosity, and many a night Wesley had spent many hours down in the library's vault pouring over the few tomes that Nick could sneak out of the vault.
Six months after Callie had taken care of her problem with her abusive boyfriend Faith had played matchmaker and had set Nick up with Callie. At first it seemed to be a disaster, but after a rough night in which Callie and Nick had ran through the rain and hid out in the library to avoid what they thought were a group of dangerously overzealous Halloween enthusiasts who in turn were actually true vampires, did the outlook change. At first Wesley hadn't noticed anything different that next day, but then he noticed that both Nick and Callie were still wearing what they had worn the night before and after more than a few knowing looks from Faith had figured out what had happened during the night. A few weeks after that Nick had begun to help Callie when she babysat Hope.
* * * * * * * *
Angel and Gwen had left the very night that Lorne had told them about what was in his latest reading. They had initially thought about driving the whole way but Gwen had protested mightily and Angel wasn't to excited about the prospect of having to black out the cars windows and dodge from one small patch of shade to another, and so they had chartered a small private plane, with some of the money that Gunn and Fred had borrowed during their little burglary spree, and were soon well on their way to New York City with them expecting to arrive either sometime late Friday night or early Saturday morning, which in turn ended up being the same Saturday morning that Faith had been allowed to oversleep. As if the news of an impending Apocalypse hadn't been enough Angel was also desperately trying to come to grips with the little surprise that Buffy and Spike had sprung on him during their visit only a few days before, that the pair were expecting their first child and that a wedding between them would most likely happen the first chance that they got. At first Angel had been beyond furious at the news, wanting to storm over and rip Spike's throat out, but he had been stopped dead in his tracks by the look of complete and utter joy, peace, and happiness on Buffy's face. He hadn't seen a look like that on her face in a very long time. It took him most of the flight to finally begin to come to terms with the news, feeling that in the end what really mattered to him that Buffy was happy, whether it be with him or Spike. And as long as Spike kept Buffy happy then Angel would refrain from doing any serious bodily harm to the former vampire. Cordelia had been overjoyed at the news as she hoped that with Buffy having Spike's baby that Angel would finally be free of Buffy and she'd finally have that second chance with Angel that she had been dreaming of. But Gwen had been a giant roadblock in that case and over the years she and Cordelia had tried to get in and stay in Angel's good graces while trying to shove the other out.
Gwen had kept most of her money, saying that since she had stopped being a thief for hire and begun fighting the good fight that she'd need the money, or as she oh so deftly put it, "A girl's gotta eat." Although even Connor knew that Gwen's statement had nothing to do with food. Angel and the others had tried there best to not have to ask Gwen for any handouts or loans. Luckily for them the vampire and demon activity in Los Angeles had stayed pretty constant and they had all established a comfortable enough lifestyle for themselves while making sure that Connor was enrolled in school and that Liam's education was completely paid for even when preschool was still a few years off.
* * * * * * * * *
Initially Spike and Buffy had sworn to Dawn that they'd let her relocate to drama school in New York without their help. But shortly after Dawn had left Buffy and Spike had packed their things and after a quick visit to Los Angeles to see Angel and the others they had sped off towards New York, intending to be there if and when Dawn became homesick or got into trouble. For even though Dawn was the new slayer Spike and Buffy still felt overprotective of her. Their secret reason for going was also to help and make sure that Dawn was able to get people around her that she could trust, maybe even enough to tell them about who she really was and about everything that entailed.
They had only gotten to Texas before Buffy began having disturbing nightmares, but she was having trouble discerning whether or not the nightmares were like her other prophetic slayer dreams, whether they were just your normal run of the mill nightmares, or whether the nightmares were somehow connected to her unborn child. Meanwhile in New York Dawn had already settled into her dorm room and after some time had finally let one of her roommates that was from the area show them around. So she thought nothing of it when they drove past a property with a line of trees out front that hid behind them a small house and a barn nestled back in the tree line.
END OF CHAPTER 2
